Four Years Old

I am four years old in the master bedroom of the Bothell house.

I sit on the bed that is usually scattered with a crumbled comforter and my mother’s desire to stay asleep.

This morning, I am four years old in the master bedroom of the Bothell house. and I can feel the snaky skin of a lost ghost slither through my hair. It travels along my ears, tracing the inner shade of my eardrum and reveals the bitter blood of a bitten tongue.

I strangle the ghost as he tries to strangle me. His chest is heavy with the compressed feeling of disappointment, I am four years old, I have only felt love.

The scent does not resemble the one I would typically steal from the earl-grey mothered morning, but it is the scent of an eerie melancholy.

Who was this lonesome invader to enter my home? The room in which I would watch my mother under her golden glory?

Yet I feel safe in the midst of my mother’s worry. Her rush in the early morning, I took my time.

Ten years later the invader is gone. He's done his doom upon our house, we no longer live in Bothell. Ten years later, my mother still flutters with worry in the early mornings. He is always lurking, unsettling. I am always four years old.